Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

Dromaeo JavaScript Testing

2173.00ms - Firefox 3b5
3499.60ms - Safari 1.3
8193.20 - Camino 1.5.5
10798.20 - SeaMonkey 1.1.8
10859.20 - Flock 1.1
12161.40ms - Firefox 2

Did you run your own tests?  What did you find?

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.
• Watching the second season of Monk too which is an awesome TV show.
• I’m totally lost on Lost but I love it.
• I’m going to be speaking on SEO and web design next week at the Art Institutes MN.  That’ll be fun since I use to go to school there and I’m not big on public speaking.
• I just bought Delicious Library.  It’s such a great program to keep track of music, movies and games.
• I’m now using MoodBlast to update my Facebook, Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku status’.  I’d love to see this as a web based app much like TwitterFeed so it can automatically post my blog posts too.

That’s what I got at the moment.

So what’s a good open source graphic design application? I’ve tried a lot of programs and now I’m looking at GIMP. GIMP is the free alternative to Photoshop. But how well does it work?

A friend said that it’s hard to convert from Photoshop to GIMP. Since I’m a Fireworks fan, I guess I don’t have to worry about that one.

But what does GIMP really do? Does it open PSD or AI files? Does it do vector or just bitmap? Easy to use?

I’ve been wanting to try it, but it requires X11 on my Mac. I’m not sure what that is so I never installed it. I may though if GIMP is cool enough.

What do you think? Is GIMP a great piece of freeware or a lacking alternative for graphic design?

Now, lets forget the basics of personalization here and just focus on the message I received:

At what point would you pitch a blogger who has got a design background when you can’t even get your fonts to match?! There are bold, italic, all caps, and more than one font in use in this email. My first impression of comes from your email and that’s definitely not a good one.

Needless to say, I didn’t respond.

Chocoflop is a free image editor for the Mac. It loads quickly, has all the basic bitmap editing tools and doesn’t seem to take up many system resources.

I use Chocoflop to quickly do image re-sizing, cropping and image conversion. It even comes with layers & filters so if I want to, I can do some image creation. One of my favorite features is the ability to copy an image off the web and then go to Chocoflop and choose ‘New from Clipboard’. Sounds so simple, but it’s so nice.

Chocoflop is handy little tool for those quick image edits. Check it out for yourself. It’s free, so what do you have to loose?

The reason I write this is I’ve added a new header to Blog on a Stick. I really liked the design, but programming it in hasn’t been great. I have a search box that didn’t line up right with imagery so I had to ax that.  It also didn’t line up well in IE so they get served up a search link instead. Heck, even the search results are showing up way to far left. Go figure.

To me, the items in the green menu bar aren’t centered and it’s bugging me. I can make them look great in Firefox Mac or Safari Mac but not both. Not sure why, but it has something to do with the form field.  Ideas anyone???

So, what we have currently is the best I could get done in a few hours. It’s nice, but bugs me that it’s not perfect. ;)  What do you think of the new header?

GA? will put a little icon in the status bar of your Firefox web browser. It will then check each page you load to to see if it has Google Analytics installed. If so, it’ll show a colored bar chart. If Google Analytics doesn’t appear to be installed, it’ll show a gray bar chart.

This is a handy little tool if you have a smaller website, if want to do a spot check on a handful of pages or if you want to ensure that certain pages are being tracked.

Known Issues:
1. It doesn’t currently re-check for each tab or window you cycle through. It only checks the page that completed loading last. Updates are planned for it to refresh per window or tab focus.  : Version 0.5 updates on tab change.

2. It doesn’t detect Google Analytics code put in the head of the document.  It only searches the body of each page.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

GA? can be downloaded at Mozilla’s Addon site.

Developed and tested on a Mac running Firefox 2.x. Works well on Windows too. Unsure of how well it work in Firefox versions less or greater than 2.x.

Mint
This has to be one of the best stats programs out there. For $30 you get the code and install it on your own server. It’s no harder than installing Wordpress which means it’s quite easy. It comes with the basic functionality and you get to choose what elements you’d like to install to customize your own stats look and feel. It’s kind of like Firefox and having the ability to add extensions/functionality as you wish. Very easy to use and you have all your stats information at your fingertips, on your own site.

Google Analytics
A must install for any website. Sure, it may give you more data that you know what your looking at, but you should at least have it for the future. Google Analytics is 100% free and very in-depth. It’s great for those who want details and like digging into every aspect. I do like this information, but feel it’s a bit much to look at on a daily basis.

Clicky (aka Performancing Stats)
I liked the interface and it seemed to work quite well. However, it is a work in progress and is getting better all the time. They recently added the ability to report on blocks of time (like the past month) so it’s starting to rank higher in my book. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes. The free version maxes out at 1000 visitors a day though so it doesn’t work for this site without paying.

FeedBurner StandardStats
I like FeedBurner’s StandardStats too. Simple and easy to use. All the basics are there; incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, pages and visitors. Another nice, and free, basic stats program. However, now that Google purchased it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the stats all rolled into Google Analytics.

103Bees
I’m not sure if it’s the bland interface or the odd usability but I’m not overjoyed about this one. It seems like it should be nice but I just can’t myself to use it.

Wordpress.com Stats (blog only)
I’m getting mixed signals with this one. With one site, it worked for a few days, then didn’t work for many more afterwards . I about gave up when it started working again. With other sites, it just works. Overall, it is a nice and simple interface that anyone can adapt to. Plus it’s free. It’s not that indepth, but is great for those that just want a quick overview of the past day or two.

Webalizer/AWStats
Ok, I’m really just putting this on the list so that people know that they are not the best stats programs. They usually come installed by default on most web servers and are better than nothing. However, they have a tendency to track things like css files and javascript files. In reality, we only want to track what pages visitors go to. If you just run Webalizer or AWStats, it’s time to look into something more indepth.

Now I know there are lots more stats programs out there. Some cost money, others are free and not all are worth the time and effort. Those above are a mix of free and low cost stats programs that all work well and they are a great addition to any site.

What stats program have you found that you like?

CSSFly creates a frame at the top of your browser where you can see the source HTML or source CSS file and you are allowed to make edits. The edits then update in real time. Great for troubleshooting web design issues or digging though someone else’s source to figure out how they archived a certain technique.

Hosted on Zooomr

Best of all, it’s free. My initial thoughts and tests are very positive. However I’d like to see Safari support and source code coloring if possible. Those are minor though. It’s a very cool tool and one that I’ll keep handy.

This design offers more color, more personality and better sidebar organization. I’ve been working on it for about the past two months and I’m very excited to show it off.

If you come across any issues, please let me now. It’s hard to catch all the bugs before going live. I do however know that there are quite a few ‘retro’ pages. I’m working at getting them all over time.

Just leave your comment, bug report or thoughts on the design in the comments below.

Internet Explorer Users!
I have checked the site, for the most part, under IE6 and it looks pretty good. Granted the background looks odd, the homepage isn’t as pretty and headers are a bit off, but it’s nothing major.

I’ve also briefly checked out the site in IE7. Somethings look better, like the homepage, where as other areas look worse. Being without frequent access to IE7 I’m sure there are more than a few bugs. It should be usable though.

I highly recommend getting Firefox, Opera or any other non-IE web browser. They are a FREE download and will import all your IE items. Not only will they make this site look fantastic, they will also make your internet life more secure.

I designed in Firefox and checked things in Safari and they were perfect. Opened up IE 6 and spend the next week or so re-working things.

My biggest issue was with blinking or disappearing text. I just didn’t understand. In my research I found out I had the peekaboo bug. It’s a lovely little issue with IE that causes the text to show and hide as it feels necessary. It’s kind a panic attack and was pissing me off. Good news is I found a fix. Just add position:relative to any areas that are disappearing and they come right back.

I’m also running into issues with EM sizes. I though using EM for font sizes instead of PX would make things easier. Come to find out it didn’t really matter. IE disregards some sizes and I’m not sure if that’s a CSS coding issue or what. The work around there was to create an IE only stylesheet and use this handy browser detection code.

And don’t start me on PNG transparency. Even JavaScript couldn’t fix that for unknown reasons. So I put my work-around in the CSS for that too.

In the end, my new design looks great in Firefox (or any Mozilla based browser), Safari and Opera. And it looks decent in IE 6.

I haven’t checked IE 7 yet and frankly I’m scared to. I don’t want to know what it sees. Ok so I do, but I don’t have access to IE 7 at the moment. Isn’t there a site that will do screenshots for you?

So when will the new site be live? I was hoping by February 1st and I think I’m on track for that deadline. Could be tomorrow, could be the first. But you’ll know it when you see it.

Actually, I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now and it’s coming along quite well. I’ve got the blog probably 75% themed with the new design and I’m still wondering what to do with the rest of the site. Part of me wants to pull it all into the /blog/ directory and the other part wants to pull the blog pieces (header, footer, sidebar) out into the rest of the website. However, I’m unsure how to do the latter right now. Thoughts?

The new site will be built on CSS with lots of color, but not to much. It’ll make things easier to find and less cluttered. Or so I hope. I’m even using EMs instead of pixels to define font sizes so hopefully everything looks the same across all screens. Ohh and a big thanks goes out to the Layout Gala for putting so many great CSS layouts online. I used one of these for my starting point.

My goal is to have the new site live by Feburary 1st if not sooner. However, it all depends on what side projects I get distracted with and what kind of time I come up with.

Most employees have had a time when someone comes in and ’simplifies’ their job. It’s bound to happen and when it does, it’s not quite as funny, but put it in a Dilbert cartoon, and it’s great.

See how the Boss works his design skills and creates a new logo.

Dilbert Cartoon - Logo Design Hosted on Zooomr

Do you have a favorite Dilbet cartoon? If so, drop the link below as I’d love to check it out.

IE7 has been a long time coming. I think they said IE6 was released 5 years ago or so? Anyways, the new IE seems to be better. I’ve been running it on my Mac (via Parallels) and it seems to be on the right track. It’s got transparent PNG support (finally), RSS support, tabs and I think it seems to work with the CSS :hover property too! All steps in the right direction but it seems like it could make things worse before it makes them better.

The reason I say this is because things never look the same in IE and any other browser. IE always needs special code and thankfully !important was created and works well. However, with IE7, things that looked right in IE6 don’t look so great any more. So, when creating websites, we may need to choose between designing for IE6 or IE7 as it seems that both are different enough to render different code. I really wish there were standards. Ohh wait, there are. Now why can’t all browsers just follow them??!!

Firefox 2 on the other hand has no rendering oddities that I’ve seen. So that’s good. I’ll admit though, when I first tried Firefox 2 release client 2 a while back I was less than impressed. I felt like there weren’t many updates. However, them more I use it, the better I realize it is.

It seems to load faster, has better built in tab abilities, more security, session savers, better RSS integration, spell check and it just seems more polished. I’m really enjoying the new theme too and, overall, I am impressed. Plus, the bookmarks must have gotten a back end makeover as some extensions, like del.icio.us, completely takeover your bookmarks and I think that’s a fantastic idea.

Both browsers are making strides to do more and be all around better browsers. But, in my book, Firefox has IE beat hands down. It’s cross platform, standards complaint, up-to-date on all technologies (like CSS & JS) and has the ability to add extensions so that the browser can be whatever you want it to be.

Which do you prefer? Or are you a Safari or Opera fan?

Updates include:

• New Chat/Comment bubble to the right of the post title.
• New Info bar under the post title including digg, del.icio.us and other social bookmarks
• Homepage has shortened posts.
• Live blog search on every page.

I have checked in most browsers and it appears to be working fine.  Some oddities in IE but then again I haven’t seen my blog on XP.  Blog on a Stick is optimized for browsers that work with the web standards.  That’s pretty much everything except IE.

Feedback always welcome.  Let me know if you find a bug, or dislike an update.  Positive feedback welcome too!!

-Thomas

For example, when you add your goal, it says e.g. http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html. But on the ‘My site’s pages are dynamically generated. How do I set up funnels and goals?’ page it shows www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1 (no http://) and on the expressions page it shows www\.google\.com.

So which is it?

Also, on the expressions page there are 11 expressions available. However none of them have a very good examples or explanations. I guess if I were a hardcore programmer these would make more sense. But what about for the more average person?

So here are my questions.

1. What is the correct way of putting in a url?
2. What is the correct way of tracking a URL that includes a session ID or other variable on the end that always changes?
3. How do you track a URL that can change in the middle.
   Example: http://www.mysite.com/14/email/ where 14 could be any number.
4. With funnels, how can I track anyone who enters the store from the iPod page and completes an order when I have no idea how many products they will look at in-between?
5. How can I track if someone comes from Sams site to mine and fills out a form or orders a product?

I’m sure Google Analytics goals can do all this, but the documentation is very vague or over my head.  I understand how to track a basic page, but funnels and dynamic pages confuse me.  If you know of a good tutorial, that’s not to technical, I’d love to read it.

Ajax Comments
Great plugin that takes the refresh out of adding a comment to the site. It simply accepts the comment and adds it to the list without ever changing screens.

Ajax LiveSearch
This replaces my default search box with a live search box. Start typing and it’ll automatically show you results. I think it has IE issues, but works great in most browsers.

I also had to get rid of Spam Karma and go for Akismet as Spam Karma and Ajax Comments didn’t play well together. Either way, I should have excellent spam protection.

If there are any issues, let me know.

It’s purpose is to help you build web forms and collect data. It doesn’t sound very exciting but it’s well done and quite slick. I’d even say it’s fun.

You just select what form fields you want, what order you want them in, set required states and you are ready to go. Wufoo creates all the code and handles everything for you.

Below is my test form that was created with Wufoo. As people fill it out, all the data collecting and reporting will be processed by Wufoo. I’ll get a better idea of the reporting functionality as I get some testers. Hint Hint

It’s extremely hard to find an application that can do all that Dreamweaver can, however, it’s even harder to pay $400 for a piece of software. I have been checking out all sorts of editors trying to find a great Dreamweaver replacement and I’ve ended up with SkEdit.

SkEdit is a nice, small application for Macs that offers a full array of features. It comes with built in FTP/SFTP/WebDAV, has code completion, a preview window, syntax coloring, tabs, Intel support and much more. The only thing I really miss is the ability to edit in design mode and spell check.

I have given SkEdit a good test run (a few months) and I’m still using it today. For only $24.95, and I believe free lifetime updates, it’s incredible. The code auto completion was a big selling feature for me and I absolutely love it.

Sure there are things that bug me but I’ve sent them off to the developer and I’m sure there are features I haven’t even checked out yet. For the price, the features and the quality, SkEdit an excellent application!

A feed is a web document that usually ends in .xml or .rss and it is a slimed down version of a website that is created to be easily syndicated. It may be represented by an orange icon.

What does it cost? $0 - It’s free.

What is a feed reader?

A feed reader is an application, stand alone or web based, that reads feeds. A feed reader is to feeds what an email application is to email.

What is a Chicklet or feed button?

A Chicklet is a feed button that has your feed readers logo and the blog’s information attached to it. It has been specifically coded to make it as easy as possible to subscribe to the site’s feed. To subscribe to our feed, just click on the Chicklet (feed button) that represents the feed reader you choose to use. If you don’t see your reader, simply click on the first orange icon and you’ll be presented with the raw rss feed. Copy this URL into your feed reader. You may need to see your feed readers help files for more information on adding feeds.

Button Examples: See my Subscribe Page.

How do I unsubscribe to a feed?

Just delete the feed from your feed reader. You may need to see your feed readers help files for specific information.

How do I know when a feed is updated?

All feed readers update periodically. You may have to push an update button, or it may happen when you load the page or open the feed reader. When updating, the feed reader will go out and check for updated information for you. If there is anything new, the feed reader will alert you; usually bolding new information.

Why is this good?

A feed reader can check all your feeds in seconds for updates without you ever having to visit the websites. 5 or 500 feeds, it doesn’t matter. It’ll do all the work much faster than you can surf to the website to check manually.  This will help you stay up to date with many different sites.
How do I set up a feed?

That’s a whole different topic. But get a blog and you’ll get a feed.